Sensei » powerpoint

There’s Something About PowerPoint

Allen Baird, Partner — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 07:00:59 +0000

Did you know that August this year saw the 25th anniversary of Microsoft PowerPoint? I can sense the yawns already…

To honour this great event, the BBC New Magazine knocked up a few interesting articles by way of sharing the boredom. The first was called The problem with PowerPoint, which contains a nine slide PowerPoint presentation – geddit? – on the history of the development of this piece of software. It also provides a presentation guru’s perspective on the weaknesses of PowerPoint, at least in terms of how it is usually used.

There problems include:

The screens are magnets for everyone’s eyes, negating all important eye-contact between speaker and audience
Reading and listening distracts the audience and adds to the monotony by removing surprise
Slides often function as notes and verbal crutches rather than visual aids
The amount of material in an average presentation leads to information overload
Bullet points are a poor substitute for visual aids

In the interests of fair-play, that famous BBC value (he said ironically), another article collected the thoughts of readers on Your PowerPoint highs and lows. The worse of these was someone whose entire office was made redundant by PowerPoint, and another in which a senior executive did a stand-up turn at a Christmas dinner with every joke in bullet-point form! The pain, the pain…

The best were the ones where presenters used cartoons and other graphics, or had one word per slide. For my money, one of the best uses of PowerPoint I’ve seen was by a guy called Tim Lee, a former scientist who now does stand-up comedy using PPT. See him in action here and here.

Confession time – I use PowerPoint alot and I have not always done so in the most effective way. But I’m keen to improve, so I’m taking a course next month on ‘Advanced Presentations Using Microsoft PowerPoint’. Hopefully I’ll get a few tips.

Here are a few articles I’ve read on PPT best practice and alternatives to it that I think are worth a read.

Steve Jobs & Guy Kawasaki – PowerPoint Best Practices

Teach Students Alternative Uses For PowerPoint

What Are The Best Fonts for Making PowerPoint Presentation Slides

PowerPoint Alternatives: Different Tools For Spicing Up Your Presentations

I’m especially interested in hearing about your experiences with PowerPoint alternatives. Anyone? The best one we’ve come across recently can be seen in the embedded Prezi presentation above.

Convert YouTube Videos For Embedding in PowerPoint

Dawn Baird, Partner — Fri, 07 Nov 2008 08:00:52 +0000

YouTube is a powerful medium. PowerPoint can be a powerful medium, if used correctly. To aid your visual learners, who prefer to see something, rather than listen or do, add YouTube videos to PowerPoint presentations and play them without need of an internet connection.

Stage 1

This set of instructions assumes you use Mozilla Firefox as your web browser. If you don’t you’ll first need to download it from here.
Download the Fast Video Download addon from here.
An icon will appear on the status bar of the browser. It is this that you will use to download YouTube videos in the first instance.

Stage 2

Open the Mozilla Firefox browser. Go to www.youtube.com.
Navigate to the video you want to use in PowerPoint.
Click the video downloader icon in the status bar.
Choose a Save As location and click Save. The file will automatically save in the .flv file format.

Stage 3

You now need to make use of a tool called SUPER.

If you need to, download SUPER from here. This will automatically add a shortcut to your desktop.

Open SUPER. You may first get a message stating that your PC does not have the minimum requirements to run SUPER. Once you click OK, this message will disappear and SUPER opens anyway. As my friends across the pond mighy say, Go Figure!

Check that tooltips are working (yellow hints that appear when you hover over any element of the window). If not, right click the grey part of the window and choose Show Useful Tips.
Open the folder where the original video download is located. You should have both this folder and SUPER visible on the screen at the same time.
Click and drag the video download from the Output folder to the DROP A VALID MULTIMEDIA FILE HERE box in the SUPER window. It appears as shown.
Choose .mpeg from the first option in the top left corner of the application.
If familiar with SUPER, choose any other options that are relevant.
Click Encode (Active Files).
A green progress bar will start moving across. When it disappears, your file is converted.
SUPER does not allow you to choose where the converted file (output) is saved. In Windows XP, this will be C:\Program Files\eRightSoft\SUPER\OutPut. If you do this alot, I’d advise creating a desktop shortcut to this location for convenience.

Stage 4

Navigate to C:\Program Files\eRightSoft\SUPER\OutPut. The file you converted will be located there.
Open the PowerPoint presentation into which you want to embed the video.
Navigate to the appropriate slide. (The rest of the instructions assume use of PowerPoint 2007. Use your initiative for earlier versions of PowerPoint.)
From the Insert tab, select Movie>Movie from File.
Navigate to the converted video. Select the video and click OK.
PowerPoint will ask how you want the video to appear. Choose either Automatically or When Clicked. I recommend the latter option.
The video appears on the slide.
Right click and choose Size and Position to resize the video, if appropriate.
Run the presentation. Test the video – click in the centre (or press F5) to play.

I hope this has been useful. Let us know if you run into any problems. Better still, let us know if you’re successful, or if there are any fantastic YouTube video links you’d recommend to other readers. Happy presenting!

Prettifying Your Presentations With PowerPoint

Dawn Baird, Partner — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 08:00:58 +0000

Dan McMillian trashes the usual mistakes made by PowerPoint presenters – the funnist presentation I’ve seen in ages. Here’s the challenge: I’m delivering another presentation early next week. Have I avoided all the things he’s hitting? I’d better go back and check!